Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

by Angela Duckworth

Regardless of gender, ethnicity, social class, or parents’ marital status, teens with warm, respectful, and demanding parents earned higher grades in school, were more self-reliant, suffered from less anxiety and depression, and were less likely to engage in delinquent behavior.

What may appear to be textbook authoritarian parenting—a no-television policy, for example, or a prohibition against swearing—may or may not be coercive. Alternatively, what may seem permissive—say, letting a child drop out of high school—may simply reflect differences in the rules parents value as important.

When our parents are loving, respectful, and demanding, we not only follow their example, we revere it. We not only comply with their requests, we understand why they’re making them. We become especially eager to pursue the same interests—for

“models of the work ethic in that they were regarded as hard workers, they did their best in whatever they tried, they believed that work should come before play, and that one should work toward distant goals.”

Further, “most of the parents found it natural to encourage their children to participate in their favored activities.”

We found over and over again that the parents of the pianists would send their child to the tennis lessons but they would take their child to the piano lessons. And we found just the opposite for the tennis homes.”

Clearly, these exemplars of grit grew up not just imitating their parents but also emulating them.

This logic leads to the speculative conclusion that not all children with psychologically wise parents will grow up to be gritty, because not all psychologically wise parents model grittiness.

“Jürgen was a master teacher,” Tobi said. “He created an environment in which it was not only possible but easy to move through ten years of career development every year.”

Each morning, Tobi would arrive at work to find a printout of the code he’d written the day before, covered in red marker with comments, suggestions, and corrections.

“This taught me not to tangle my ego up in the code I write,” Tobi said. “There are always ways to improve it and ...

“Jürgen somehow knew the extent of my comfort zone and manufactured situations which were slightly outside it.

I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.

If you work harder, if you keep pushing yourself, you can get to that level. You have nothing to lose by trying.”

“I went from ‘Why bother?’ to ‘Why not?’ I knew I might not get into a really good college, but I figured, if I try, I have a chance. If I never try, then I have no chance at all.”

“Stay positive,” Cody said. “Go past those negative beliefs in what’s possible and impossible and just give it a try.”

“You don’t need to be a parent to make a difference in someone’s life. If you just care about them and get to know what’s going on, you can make an impact. Try to understand what’s going on in their life and help them through that. That’s something I experienced firsthand. It made the difference.”

finding a way out of the suffering is what does the strengthening.

In fact, if I could wave a magic wand, I’d have all the children in the world engage in at least one extracurricular activity of their choice, and as for those in high school, I’d require that they stick with at least one activity for more than a year.

But I do think kids thrive when they spend at least some part of their week doing hard things that interest them.

When kids are playing sports or music or rehearsing for the school play, they’re both challenged and having fun.

But what about grit? What about accomplishing something that takes years, as opposed to months, of work?

One horse did win, and by a long stretch: follow-through.

“The follow-through rating involved evidence of purposeful, continuous commitment to certain types of activities (in high school) versus sporadic efforts in diverse areas.”

After controlling for high school grades and SAT scores, follow-through in high school extracurriculars predicted graduating from college with academic honors better than any variable.

The key was that students had signed up for something, signed up again the following year, and during that time had made some kind of progress.

What Willingham calls “follow-through” sounds a lot like grit!

“Looking for clear signs of productive follow-through is a useful way to mine the student’s track record.”

But the more important goal was to see whether follow-through would predict the same showing-up-instead-of-dropping-out outcomes that are the hallmark of grit.

Learning to follow through on something hard in high school, I said, seemed the best-possible preparation for doing the same thing later in life.

he said he’d give applicants a programming task he knew would require hours and hours of tedious troubleshooting. This wasn’t an IQ test, or a test of programming skills. Rather, it was a test of a person’s ability to muscle through, press on, get to the finish line. Bill only hired programmers who finished what they began.

I recruited 1,200 seniors and, just as Willingham had done, asked them to name their extracurricular activities (if they had any), when they’d participated in them, and how they’d distinguished themselves doing them, if at all.

Following Willingham’s lead, my research team calculated Grit Grid scores by quantifying multiyear commitment and advancement in up to two activities.

Activities that students pursued for multiple years and in which they could point to some kind of advancement (for example, member of the student government one year and treasurer the next) each earned a second point.

My best guess is that following through on our commitments while we grow up both requires grit and, at the same time, builds it.

By contrast, more agreeable adolescents entered a virtuous cycle of psychological development. These “nice kids” secured higher-status jobs offering greater financial security—outcomes that enhanced their tendency toward sociability.

The real question is whether they’re encouraged to employ their good old-fashioned hard work and their grit, if you will, to its maximum. In the end, those are the people who seem to be the most successful.”

His intuition was that following through on hard things teaches a young person powerful, transferable lessons.

Compared to rats in the “easy condition,” rats who were previously required to work hard for rewards subsequently demonstrate more vigor and endurance on the second task.

Bob figured that working for your supper, so to speak, might teach rats to work harder on an effortful training task.

children who’d trained on difficult (rather than easy) tasks worked harder on the copying task.

With practice, industriousness can be learned.

learned industriousness. His major conclusion was simply that the association between working hard and reward can be learned.

Bob will go further and say that without directly experiencing the connection between effort and reward, animals, whether they’re rats or people, default to laziness.

When a student ambled in late to class, they got a stern lecture about the importance of respecting other people’s time.

If a student forgot to wear their leotard that day, or left their ballet shoes at home, they sat and watched the other children for the entire class and weren’t allowed to participate.

When a move was executed incorrectly, there were endless repetitions and adjustments until, at last, this teacher...

In our family, we live by the Hard Thing Rule. It has three parts.

A hard thing is something that requires daily deliberate practice.

You can quit. But you can’t quit until the season is over, the tuition payment is up, or some other “natural” stopping point has arrived.